When the audience at the Royal Opera applauds the opera director for taking liberties

The dramatic twist Dmitri Tcherniakov applied to The Tale of Tsar Saltan works so well that, upon finishing the opera, one wonders how it could have been any different all this time. How could Alexander Pushkin's story and the title Rimsky-Korsakov composed based on it work without turning the tsar's character into an autistic boy? A sentient being whose imagination encompasses all those Korsakovian magical worlds, with their fable and spells.

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Almost a decade ago, the Russian stage director tackled this title based on Pushkin's narrative poem, a popular children's story that every babushka tells her grandchildren, but which can also be directed at an adult audience when someone applies wit and logic. The audience at the Teatro Real gave the stage director a standing ovation on opening night, April 30th, a strange sight when what he's done is take liberties and twist the plot, turning the libretto's happy ending into a slap in the face of reality.

It was the first time this opera, premiered in 1900 in Moscow, was seen at the Royal Opera House. Like the rest of Rimsky-Korsakov's 15 operas, it is one of those rarely performed outside of Russia, apart from its famous interlude from the Flight of the Bumblebee in the third act, in which the prince visits his father transformed into a bumblebee. In any case, the Liceu was the first international theatre to host it.

Wednesday's audience was, therefore, unfamiliar with the plot and, perhaps for that reason, very interested, although it's also possible that yesterday Real Madrid was a refuge for Real Madrid fans dodging a Champions League semi-final from which their team had been eliminated and which, to make matters worse, was being contested by Barça. The tale of Tsar Saltán could have seemed a thousand times more appealing than a possible victory for their eternal rival.

Rimsky-Korsakov thus went out to win in a fairly full lyric coliseum in the capital, with a lustrous pit that reached almost 90 musicians, plus the sixty of the Intermezzo choir that José Luís Basso had intelligently arranged, refraining from combining voices on stage with others behind the scenes. All of them conducted by Ouri Bronchti, the Israeli who is an assistant at La Monnaie in Brussels and who is replacing the announced Karel Mark Chichon for medical reasons, and who can hardly be reproached for his handling of this Slavic title, except that the dramaturgical turn encourages him to tend towards the forte , especially when it comes to mocking the orchestral colors of the happy ending and, instead, unhinging the autistic protagonist with noise and clatter.

But let's continue step by step: the story is about a woman, Tsarina Militrisa (the capable soprano Svetlana Aksenova, who sang Tatiana in the Liceu opera Onegin ), whom her sisters vilify, seeking her ruin. Married to a boorish monarch and obsessed by the need for a son to continue the throne (the powerful bass Ante Jerkunica), the young woman will live three weeks of happiness at his side, until he leaves for war and she gives birth a few months later. The good news that the Tsar will receive, however, will have been intercepted by Militrisa's sisters: the creature his wife gave birth to is not normal, it is a monster. Horrified, the Tsar orders the child and mother to be put in a barrel and thrown into the sea.

Both survive—"the waves will be your cradle," he sings to the baby—and arrive on a deserted island, which, according to the tale, is full of magic. Prince Guidon and his mother will implement a political and artistic utopia there, where humanity and nature live in harmony. But this space of freedom and happiness, far removed from wars and conspiracies, is transformed by Tcherniakov into the mental world of a boy who lives in a bubble, isolated from the outside world, protected by his mother, and who has the naiveté of being an autistic child (the acting of the Ukrainian tenor Bogdan Volkov is commendable), but who actually hides tragedy.

The great virtue is the way of inserting real artists into the video projection, to the point of seating them around a table that melts like a Dali clock.

His mental world isn't transparent; it's full of chiaroscuros. And all of this is reproduced in a fabulous animated comic strip by Petersburg lighting designer Gleb Filshtinsky, which serves as a backdrop. The stage director and set designer's great virtue is his way of inserting the real artists into this video projection, to the point of seating them around a table that melts like a Dali clock, for everything escapes reason as this society conceives it. The prince will fall in love with the swan princess (a much-lauded Nina Minasyan), but there will be no romantic relationship: she becomes real, transformed into something resembling a volunteer or social worker charged with protecting him. And in his genuine naiveté, Guidón can't help feeling repulsed by his idiot father...

Orchestra, singers, stage crew... everyone captured the audience's attention with an opera that, a priori, was a journey into Russian tradition. In fact, it emerged thanks to the creative vitality of the Private Opera, when the imperial monopoly on performances was abolished in Russia. Joan Matabosch, artistic director of the Royal Opera House, explains this well in the libretto: the patron, stage director, and visionary Savva Mamontov (1841-1918) founded the company that would radically rethink the lyric genre to commit to the internal coherence of the performance and to dramaturgy.

At that time, the divas were already opposed to this theatrical laboratory that would ultimately influence Konstantin Stanislavsky. The divas of the moment, such as Nadezhda Zabela-Vrubel, wife of the painter Mikhail Vrubel, who was a collaborator of Mamontov, were the type of singers that the Private Opera rejected. But this one in particular had fascinated Rimsky-Korsakov, so much so that he imposed her for this title. Both she and the company had to make concessions, and according to contemporary chronicles, the result was admirable, and the soprano became the composer's muse in subsequent operas.